Tag Archives: Johannesburg

Attention Vaalies ‘The Beach’ has arrived in Jozi

 

Play Braamfontein has brought the beach to Jozi! Situated across from the Neighbourgoods market The Beach is open from 11am to 4pm and has a cover charge of R150…cheaper than a flight to Cape Town…it also gets you a bunch of beer sponsored by those guys who make the salad dressing dispensers Grolsch.  I’m going tomorrow and I cant wait!

Check out their Facebook page: The Beach

Red Hot Chili Peppers…FREE STUFF

Hey there!

So ABC has been given two tickets to giveaway to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Johannesburg.

Yay for those of you that weren’t lucky enough to get any!

So if you want them do the following:

  1. Like ABC it’s me
  2. Post a picture, sob story…or pretty much anything to get yourself some attention
  3. Tag ABC it’s me in the post
  4. Hold your breath to see if you have won

 

It’s simple! So just do it…competition runs till the end of December 2012. So you have nothing but time get creative!

 

Jozi you’re alright

So as you all know I love my larger than life city Johannesburg, found this awesome film made by a group of visiting filmmakers. If you didn’t already love Johannesburg already I suggest you start! Heres another recent post on Joburg you may be interested in reading What Burger King and the Internet a have in common

Check the video out:

Greenside stops sucking…a little less

I don’t like Gin, what I do like is going to Gin…well at least now I do.

I think those of us who have been going to Greenside since…well let’s just say a very long time, can agree that it has turned into somewhat of a trap for boets and highly strung girls parading around on the sidewalk wearing unreasonably high shoes and cocktail dresses.

Now first things first why would you attempt to walk around the incredibly uneven pavement in 6inch heals? It’s more bizarre than someone joining the KONY2012 cause. I have actually made it into a sport watching these young girls (because no woman would make that mistake), and betting on how far they can walk before slipping or tripping up on a jagged piece of concrete.

They generally travel in packs of three or more and then attempt to look relaxed as they sit at Mamma’s Shebeen looking more out of place than Julius Malema at an ANC meeting, with splinters from the worn out furniture up their ass, which further attributes to the ‘I literally have a stick up my ass look’, that is more noticeable than their YDE bought cocktail dress that is exactly the same as their BFFs’ who is trailing behind trying to mask a twisted ankle and a scraped knee dealt out by the ever vengeful pothole just before Bob Rocks. Yes you know the one I’m talking about.

Even Bob Rocks has turned from an Indie ‘hidey hole’…into just a hole. I went there for a drink last week where I was assaulted by a teenager wearing the thickest chain I have ever seen, accompanied by the entire earth’s supply of gel in his hair, which I have to admit, is pretty impressive.

Where hipsters once lined the walls skulking about their really bad choice to go through with getting that bowl shaped haircut, were now exact replicas of those awful Bratz dolls in what I presume were there ‘Disco Feva’ outfits. Needless to say it sucked listening to The Black Eyed Peas while being judged for my flat shoes and disheveled hair.

Defeated I joined my friends at Gin, expecting the usual dub-step crazed crowd guarding the bar making it harder to get to than Mordor on a bad day. What was usually a struggle which included grasping onto the hands of my friends screaming share the load and having to fight a pissed off Nazgûl just to reach the toilet turned into a pleasant 14 second walk, where I got my drink after a minute or two of waiting and what’s more service with a smile!

Still a little sceptical and trying to guide my friend who had been present for the half price cocktails a few hours earlier and had drunken more than her fair share my ears were graced with the sound of The Pixies and then RHCP and then about an hour of straight up rock and flipping roll. What’s more is that every Tue night they are hosting an Indie night and in their words “The Good Old Days are Back Again”…it sure seems like it.

See all the details for the event here: The Good Old Days are Back Again.

As luck would have it

I was talking to a good friend of mine on the weekend about a number of things as the conversation wound down I said with a sigh: “oh well that’s life” !

He turned to look at me clutching his ice cold Hansa that I was admittedly eyeing out and said: “No”

“No, it’s not life, I’ve been alive for 24 years and it’s not life.”

When someone breaks into our house and only steals the entire contents but no one is hurt they are not lucky and it is not part of life. As South Africans we have become accustomed to certain very harsh realities about life here. One of them is that no matter how high your fences are or how high-tech your alarm system is there is a very real chance that at any point your house could get broken into. So often family members are either beaten or raped or murdered for no real reason, so we call the people who were tied up and harassed ‘lucky’ because they were not killed in the process.

When I was growing up I thought being lucky was finding a Smartie I had dropped a month ago on the floor of my mom’s car, then as I grew older it became getting lucky which involved a older boy from K.E.S and the St John’s Valentines social. Now if I’m lucky I can have my possessions taken from me without being killed.

It’s not life we are not lucky and just plain nonsense.

By calling ourselves lucky not to be raped and shot are we not enabling in a sense? I can foresee the hate mail flooding in already; but are we not in a sense making it okay and normalising the problem. Is it ingrained in our thinking because we have been exposed to it for so long? If violent crime…or crime in general happened less in South Africa would it be dealt with more harshly would it be frowned upon more?

When Whitney Houston is on the front cover of the newspaper and shoved in the dark corners where no one really bothers to look are the stories of the kidnappings, rapes, robberies and murders; surely we have a problem?

Although being Whitney Houston is the greatest crime of all…some may argue.

Me-1 Left Nostril -1

I remember reading the biography Emma, about a young woman who is blind and her relationship she has with her dog…It was a little too ambitious for my 9 year old mind and I think the real meaning of the story was lost on me. I remember two very distinct things about the book. 1. The lady on the books cover was wearing the most appalling glasses; even a hipster wouldn’t touch them and 2. The descriptions of her regaining her sight.

Having recently regained my sense of smell after a long drawn out fight against my left nostril I fell much like the lady in Emma. One of the first things she saw was grass and she didn’t know what it was or what the colour green was. Now I guess you can say that comparing my blocked nose to a blind person being able to see after an operation is somewhat dramatic, but I can imagine that I felt a miniscule part of what she felt.

Now I’m not clued up on the way people breathe. Do most people breathe out of their noses or their mouths or is it a mixture? Either way I have happily been breathing out of my nose for about 22 years and I was very seriously put off when my blasted left nostril lead a revolt against me leaving me breathing  out of my mouth for this past week.

Make no mistake breathing out of your mouth is no easy task and leaves ones lips seriously chapped. In an effort to cure myself of my seriously cracked lips and as a ‘f you’ to my left nostril I popped into Dischem to find myself some intense lip moisturiser.  After looking at the range of what must have been at least 40 different types of lip balm I settled on a tube of soft lips, French vanilla flavour…or its scent was French vanilla seeing as you don’t actually eat the lipice.

Regardless I cracked opened the lid of the lipice and the scent reached my nose sending me back 6 years to high school where it was all the rage to carry about ten different types of lip gloss and lipice with you in your blazer pocket.

I remember a entire school of girls would parade around smelling like artificial fruit flavours or in my case French Vanilla, why we did this I’m not entirely sure, I guess it was just one of those fads no one can really explain, much like the hipster bowl cuts seen scattered along Corlett Drive and supporting Julius Malema. It’s rather fashionable but most people try avoid eye contact with you and really can’t understand why the hell you are doing it.

The point is having been deprived of my sense of smell for a full week I realised just how important smell is to me. Smells, good or bad, always send me reeling back to particular events or people.

Hugo boss will always remind me of my ‘real’ boyfriend, he always wore a watch that smelled constantly of it. It’s still my favourite cologne for men and holds a certain power over me. I’m like a shark that’s caught the scent of blood in the water when I smell it…so watch out!

The smell of sewers will always remind me of the majority of cities in Asia, but even a rancid smell like the smell that infects your nostrils on any street corner in Bangkok still warms my heart and reminds me of days spent exploring the city clutching a bottle of homemade orange juice fighting the waves of sewer smell educed nausea that would overcome my entire body.

Tipo Tinto the most fantastic Mozambican rum, even a passing wiff of it takes me back to days spent on the beach and nights spent bent over the stoep throwing up whole pieces of pasta after what I would call a very successful hundreds club.

And  you thought you had won; didn’t you left nostril?

What Valentine’s Day and slave labour have in common

 

So let’s skip back a few thousand years to February 14 where a young Catholic Priest was martyred for goodness knows what…all I can be sure of is that there must have been lots of blood and guts, perhaps even some cheering from a few Roman soldiers. Skip forward to 2012 and what is about to happen this coming Tuesday is much worse: the annual celebration of Valentine’s Day.

I remember shaking in my scuffed Toughies in my first year of high school as the tacky plastic roses were handed out, some girls getting up to ten roses.

“TEN ROSES! You are thirteen and you got ten roses!” I thought the envy taking a hold of me.

“I bet you let ten different boys touch your boobs,” I thought trying to justify the unfairness of my situation while looking down at my flat chest, making a mental note to stuff my bra with some tissues the next time a went out.

“Plus I mean all that wasted plastic that you won’t recycle! You are the sole cause for global warming!”

I remember my ears pricked up as I heard my name being called across the classroom: “Anna-Belle…Anna-Belle!”

“A rose for me? One tacky plastic bright red rose for me? Surely one rose wouldn’t affect global warming that much?” I recall being so excited about my one stupid rose and parading it around all day by attaching it to my school bag so the petals poked out for everyone to see. I recently found out that the boy who sent me the rose came out to his parents a few years back…of course I got my first valentine from a gay man.

Anyways Valentine’s Day in school was just a popularity contest, who got the most roses was usually relative to the amount of hand jobs the particular girl had given…or was going to give at the St John’s Valentines social.

Valentine’s Day now days is just a flurry of vulgar white teddy bears followed by awkward sex later on that night between two people pretending to love each other just for the day, excluding of course those couples that actually do love each other.  But even you couples that do actually care for one another have a little originality, please.

No woman is going to be impressed by a shitty teddy bear …diamonds will however be accepted.

No man is going to be impressed by silky boxers with hearts on…and to be honest no grown man should be wearing silky boxers.

It’s all been done before; have a little originality and show the person you love all the time not just on the days you feel obliged to.

To be honest if you celebrate  Valentine’s Day you are celebrating slave labour…where do you think that card screeching a recording of ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’ came from.

I say lets go back to the original Valentine’s Day celebrations, I choose blood and guts over shitty clichés any day.